Gender Minority Stress: A Critical Review

ABSTRACT

Past studies that compare cisgender to transgender (or trans) and gender diverse people have found a higher prevalence of mental health problems among the latter groups. This article uses Testa’s gender minority stress framework, which is an expansion of minority stress theory, to assess minority stressors that are specific to the experiences of trans and gender diverse people. The concept of cisnormativity, an ideology that positions cisgender identities as a norm, is used in relation to the gender minority stress framework to describe the marginalizing nature of social environments for trans and gender diverse people. This article provides a critical review that integrates and expands on past theoretical perspectives on gender minority stressors and protective factors. Specifically, this article demonstrates the relevance of cultural and ethnic backgrounds to complement the application of intersectionality in research on health disparities experienced by trans and gender diverse people.     

Is the medium the message? Perceptions of and reactions to crisis communication via twitter, blogs and traditional media

Value changes and the rapid emergence of media innovations (internet, social web) in society lead to an institutionalization of crisis communication, in which especially new media play a crucial role. The key contributions of the paper include deepening and refocusing the theoretical foundations of crisis communication by experimentally analyzing the effects of traditional and social-media strategies on the recipients’ perceptions of reputation; and by analyzing the effects or crisis responses on the recipients’ secondary crisis communications (e.g., sharing information and leaving a message) and reactions (e.g., willingness to boycott). The results indicated that the medium matters more than the message. For all three dependent measures - reputation, secondary crisis communication and reactions - main effects of medium occurred, whereas the message had only a significant main effect on secondary crisis reactions.     

Der Aufbau von interpersonalen Beziehungen in MUDs: Die Rolle von Motiven und Kommunikationsstrategien

This paper focuses on the question how friendships can be built up in virtual communities, especially in multi-user dungeons (MUDs). According to the Social Information Processing Perspective (SIP; Walther, 1992), users of computer-mediated communication learn how to compensate the lack of nonverbal cues by using specific communication strategies (e.g. emoticons). The predictions derived from SIP were tested in a sample of MUDders. Additionally, the role of motives was studied. Results revealed that emoticons in fact are seen as helpful in expressing socioemotional contents. The use of emoticons also correlates with development of online-friendships. However, this correlation was moderated by the primary motivation to participate in MUDs.     

Hanging Out With Which Friends? Friendship‐Level Predictors of Unstructured and Unsupervised Socializing in Adolescence

Companions are central to explanations of the risky nature of unstructured and unsupervised socializing, yet we know little about whom adolescents are with when hanging out. We examine predictors of how often friendship dyads hang out via multilevel analyses of longitudinal friendship‐level data on over 5,000 middle schoolers. Adolescents hang out most with their most available friends and their most generally similar friends, not with their most at‐risk or similarly at‐risk friends. These findings vary little by gender and wave. Together, the findings suggest that the risks of hanging out stem from the nature of hanging out as an activity, not the nature of adolescents' companions, and that hanging out is a context for friends' mutual reinforcement of preexisting characteristics.     

Crisis and Disaster Counseling: Lesson Learned from Hurricane Katrina and Other Disasters

Social work education has a major role in preparing social workers to engage in policy practice intended to impact policies which can affect the well-being of their service users and address social problems. Legislative advocacy is one of these strategies. This article describes and evaluates an innovative 4-day intensive course on legislative advocacy for MSW students from two schools of social work, which took place within Israel’s parliament and drew upon elements of active and experiential learning. The evaluation study was based on a nonequivalent comparison group design with pretest (a month before the course)–posttest (4 months after the completion of the course) measurements. The study group consisted of the 29 students who participated in the intensive course while the comparison group consisted of 33 students who did not. The study, which employed quantitative tools along with open-ended questions, revealed that the course succeeded in accomplishing some of its desired outcomes. Compared to a group of their peers, the course enhanced the participants’ knowledge on the parliament and on legislative advocacy, their political interest, their perceived legislative advocacy skills, and the likelihood that they will engage in legislative advocacy in the future.     

Keeping open by re‐imagining laughter and fear

Speaking to the debate on the nature of critique, this article is about the struggle to produce an account when listening to and retelling stories. It begins with the disconcertment over listening to a coherent story that emerges in interviews about the development of performance indicators for Dutch hospital care. The indicators are presented as solutions to the problem of unruliness in the healthcare world. Drawing on Helen Verran's work on generative critique I slow down the ‘problem‐solution‐found’ plot. Instead of contrasting the apparently coherent stories with the complexities of an ‘underlying’ practice of healthcare, I hold on to my initial disconcertment so that ‘fleetingly subtle’ interruptions become entry points for generative critique. Taking Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's understanding of the relation that fear and laughter have to alterity, I show how fear and laughter permit generative critique within seemingly coherent stories. In the case of indicator development, the interviewees ‘laugh away’ what they consider alter from quality and safety in healthcare: having no control over what is going on, polyglotism instead of a common language, and inaction as opposed to taking one's time. Paying attention to disconcerting interruptions generates sensitivity and questions rather than yet another set of (critical) problem‐solution‐found answers. How can ridiculed (laughed away) subjectivity be acknowledged as important entry points for including alterity in supervision? And how to position the acknowledgement, not as an antidote, but as a way of rendering the fear of alterity generative? Nurturing sensitivities is crucial for keeping open, which means resisting both the sticky tendency of normalizing accounts and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. I conclude that keeping open by re‐imagining critique resonates with the creativity of collective life in actual times and places. Thereby it offers a promising potential for doing worlds differently.     

Impact of Microbial Ecology of Meat and Poultry Products on Predictions from Exposure Assessment Scenarios for Refrigerated Storage

A novel extension of traditional growth models for exposure assessment of food-borne microbial pathogens was developed to address the complex interactions of competing microbial populations in foods. Scenarios were designed for baseline refrigeration and mild abuse of servings of chicken broiler and ground beef Our approach employed high-quality data for microbiology of foods at production, refrigerated storage temperatures, and growth kinetics of microbial populations in culture media. Simple parallel models were developed for exponential growth of multiple pathogens and the abundant and ubiquitous nonpathogenic indigenous microbiota. Monte Carlo simulations were run for unconstrained growth and growth with the density-dependent constraint based on the "Jameson effect," inhibition of pathogen growth when the indigenous microbiota reached 10(9) counts per serving. The modes for unconstrained growth of the indigenous microbiota were 10(8), 10(10), and 10(11) counts per serving for chicken broilers, and 10(7), 10(9) and 10(11) counts per serving for ground beef at respective sites for backroom, meat case, and home refrigeration. Contamination rates and likelihoods of reaching temperatures supporting growth of the pathogens in the baseline refrigeration scenario were rare events. The unconstrained exponential growth models appeared to overestimate L. monocytogenes growth maxima for the baseline refrigeration scenario by 1500-7233% (10(6)-10(7) counts/serving) when the inhibitory effects of the indigenous microbiota are ignored. The extreme tails of the distributions for the constrained models appeared to overestimate growth maxima 110% (10(4)-10(5) counts/serving) for Salmonella spp. and 108% (6 x 10(3) counts/serving) for E. coli O157:H7 relative to the extremes of the unconstrained models. The approach of incorporating parallel models for pathogens and the indigenous microbiota into exposure assessment modeling motivates the design of validation studies to test the modeling assumptions, consistent with the analytical-deliberative process of risk analysis.     

Attitudes towards lesbians and gay men and support for lesbian and gay human rights among psychology students

A questionnaire comprising two scales, the short form of the Attitudes Towards Lesbians and Gay Men Scale (ATLG-S; Herek, 1984) and the newly devised Support for Lesbian and Gay Human Rights Scale (SLGHR) were administered to 226 students taking undergraduate psychology courses at universities in the United Kingdom, to assess their attitudes towards lesbians and gay men, and their level of support for lesbian and gay human rights. The results indicated that whilst only a small percentage of respondents expressed negative attitudes towards lesbians and gay men on the ATLG-S, the sample as a whole did not overwhelmingly support lesbian and gay human rights. The lack of support for lesbian and gay human rights is discussed in relation to its implications for psychology students as future practitioners and policymakers.